A pocket full of mumbles @orangetruth - Tumblr Blog

This hack will save your teeth: there are no “right” and “wrong” times to brush your teeth.

It gets in your head that you brush after eating when you wake up and when you go to sleep. Yeah that’s all well and good, but those are times that don’t have a lot of motivation and control…So just…brush your teeth at a different time.

You go to the bathroom in the middle of the day and are like “I should brush my teeth” DO IT!!!! Don’t listen to the other half of that sentence that says “shit but it’s not the right time”

I don’t care if you’re about to eat, or get coffee, or whatever.

If you are there and you want to…do it.

legsdemandias

Honestly this hack will solve most of problems. Just stop assigning meaningless “right” and “wrong” to tasks and start saying “I can pretty much do whatever I want whenever I want and society and its expectations don’t really matter to me”.

If there’s no barrier in the first place you don’t have to get over it.

worldwithoutmiracles

huge ADHD hack. if you can get over the “all or nothing”, moralizing, judging aspect of every action you “should” take, you’ll discover you can get more done than you expect.

I’m a big fan of the 2 PM shower. spend a whole morning feeling lazy and guilty, then just decide to start the day over again, even if it is lunchtime.

you can always begin again. any hour, any moment can be the beginning. you can choose that. the clock doesn’t run you, you run the clock

monstersandmaw

you can always begin again. any hour, any moment can be the beginning. you can choose that

prokopetz

Did you play AD&D? I can't remember how old you are, so hopefully that's not too offensive. If so, was a typical game really as hostile as people say it was?

That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".

A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!

In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.

The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.

A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.

In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).

It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.

Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?

The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!

These kids purchased the repackaged survival modules along with all their other D&D books; having no frame of reference, they assumed that these represented what a "standard" D&D adventure was supposed to look like – and since they weren't experienced players with whole binders full of pre-generated backup characters at their fingertips, the result was a lot of seemingly unfair total party kills, and a lot of kids concluding that the previous generation's GMs must have been objectively insane.

stephenleasheppard

There is an additional amusing point of order here, which is the answer to the following two questions. I once had a discussion with someone in Gary Gygax's gaming group, who was involved in early TSR work a bit. Allow me to paraphrase my questions and his answers.

Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?

"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"

Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?

"No, why would it?"

sabotflask

One of my favorite anecdotes about early D&D, from Blog of Holding:

"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.

"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?

“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.

"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.

"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.

"Gary and his players couldn’t believe that the tournament players had been so incautious. But, to be fair, none of those tournament groups had played in Gary Gygax’s game. They had learned the rules of D&D, but they had no experience of the milieu in which the book was written. Of those nine groups that had learned D&D from a book, only one played sufficiently like Gary’s group to survive thirty seconds in his dungeon."

prokopetz

#ngl survival module sounds fun as fuck. maybe i gotta torture my current group a bit (via @nadaismus)

It's worth bearing in mind that tournament-style survival mode developed in the context of a version of D&D where you can create a new character and hit the ground knowing everything you need to know to effectively play them in just a couple of minutes. 5E isn't structurally terribly well-suited for the binder-full-of-backup-PCs approach, and it's definitely a recipe for disaster in 3E or Pathfinder unless your entire group consists of a very particular flavour of high-effort masochists.

v-lagopus

It might also be worth mentioning that in, 1st Edition AD&D, there was an assumption that each character would have a small group of henchmen with them (limited by their charisma, up to 15 henchmen for folks with Charisma of 18).

These henchmen were considered characters of their own, with classes and levels. Usually the same class as the character the followed, but usually of lower level.

So, for example, a single fighter with a charisma between 9 and 13 could have around 4 or 5 other fighters just hanging out with them, helping and assisting.

So if your main character died, well, the loyal henchman who'd been there all along could just pick up the fight and would obviously know everything that had happened because they'd been there!

And let's not also forget that, at certain levels (usually around 8th or 9th depending on class), some characters attract loyal followers. I honestly don't remember the rules on how many followers you get depending on your class. I have a vague memory that a fighter could get a single "leader" type between 4th and 7th level and then a horde of like 100 to 200 0-level fighters. Or that rangers could have 3d12 followers that were a mix of low-level characters and animal companions. Or that thieves could have 5d6 lower-level thieves following them.

And let's not also forget that it was assumed the party would have various hirelings - various torch-bearers, treasurer-bearers, camp watchers, cooks, etc. - who, while not necessarily being characters, could suddenly get "glow ups" if needed.

So, for a module like Tomb of Horrors which was supposedly designed for characters between levels 10 to 14, a party of 5 player characters could easily have 50 to 150 folks with character classes just tagging along, being in the area - making it easy to have in-game reasons to have a binder full of backups and just throw dozens of people into a veritable thresher of a module!

Now, whether or not your D&D group played with all those rules, who knows - but Gygax and his team did!

( <= green bean

( <= chili pepper

. <= blueberry

=3 <= broccoli

● <= orange

. <= pea

• <= plum

<3< <= strawberry

translesbianorchestra

<==}< <= carrot

shiba-boyfriend

~<O{ <= beetroot

tittytoreador

°o8~ <= grapes

halftoning-deactivated20240224

Ó <= apple

nynaeve-almeara

88- <= raspberry

shrike-dyke

c'ɔ <= bell pepper

thekaylahub-deactivated20231205

cc’ɔɔ <= pumpkin

isa-ah

-8 <= cherries

loverlighted

☆{ } <= pineapple

trapny

¶\__________ <= garden hose (to water all the plants)

wizardshark

alright everyone good work gardening today. Let's all head inside and get some lemonade now

amayikes

|■| <= lemonade

plain-flavoured-english

As a Greek, in response to the current controversy about Matt Damon being cast as Odysseus, I'd just like to share that one of the moments that changed my brain chemistry as a kid was reading a novelized version of the Odyssey and coming across the following description of Odysseus when Circe sees him for the first time and thinks he's hot: "his hair curled like a clematis and his eyes were very brown".

So may I present my own casting choice for Odysseus:

plain-flavoured-english

Excuse me???

ruffboi-mags

you are right and you should say it.

instantduckninja

Is this the face of a man who would put his own infant in front of a plow to avoid going to war?

Absolutely not

You know who would try that shit?

Is this the face of a man who would defy the very gods to get home to his wife?

You know who would defy the gods just to show he could get away with it?

fluffmugger

The last thing Penelope's suitors ever see:

beardedmrbean

Congratulations on the cat

blumineck

Archery x flower arranging

This was actually really fun!

Anyway, don’t forget I’m still raising money to test a bunch of things in a suit of armour:

Blumineck is trying to fun a video series doing fun and serious historical and fantasy testing in fitted plate armour.

catchymemes

transparentgentlemenmarker

Les dances à travers le monde

apollosdrunkenmixup

my favourite thing about this is some are very traditional dances integral to that country/culture; and some are one individuals favourite move

and he approaches all of them with enthusiasm and a surprising amount of skill

kawuli

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

yomikoreadsbooks

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

saxifraga-x-urbium

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines.

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted.

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy.

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden.

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching.

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar.

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results.

https://www.mojeek.com/

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites.

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

#search engines #so I can find it later #so I can find this later

criminallyaddictedtomilk

nuttysaladtree

@elodieunderglass

elodieunderglass

That is very strange indeed!

blumineck

It’s the final few days of the Bluminarmour Project! After some issues with Kickstarter let’s see how far we can get!

If you want to see fantasy tropes, historical movement and silly tricks tested in authentic full plate armour, please consider chucking a few quid over (or like and share this post):

Blumineck is trying to fun a video series doing fun and serious historical and fantasy testing in fitted plate armour.

sociallyunacceptableart4

This was my art school’s water fountain. Drink from them wolf tiddies

mando-lore

Assignment misunderstood. I have now built a city.

mando-lore

Give it a day

alexaloraetheris

status-quo-hater

I think one of the funniest abortion stances I've heard was from my parents neighbor. He's a like, hard-core libertarian viking larper guy who is very tall and very fat and very bald.

He believes a fetus is human with a soul, but also its "basically attacking the woman's body" so if she wants to get rid of it, that's "basically self-defense". He compared it to shooting a home invader. So he supports abortion not as healthcare, but as killing a baby in self-defense

status-quo-hater

Y'know I'm so glad someone reminded me of this. Because this was also discussed.

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

He brought up people consensually hurting each other, didn't go for one of the obvious answers like boxing or body mods or something, no he went STRAIGHT TO BDSM and he DIDN'T EVEN REMEMBER THE ACRONYM

quakerjoe

deadgenerations

90k hahahaha get fucked cunts

deadgenerations

i was lazy and didn't post the full context but people are interested in this one. tl;dr under new Australian laws customers can be held liable for workplace harassment, not just employers, and can be taken to court for essentially the same behaviour you'd expect a manager to face court for

also: homophobic harassment is considered sexual harassment in Australian courts, which apparently is not really the case in the US I guess?

This court decision has major implications for employees in public-facing workplaces, including retail, hospitality and health.

this is a big win and gives workers another avenue of protecting themselves, as they no longer need to rely on their employer deciding to give a shit.

justalurkr

Xitter ate the tweet this is from, but Tim Bender posted it

On what the male loneliness epidemic is really about. Given actual alternatives, women are opting tf OUT of "traditional roles".

Edited to add found the tweet

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A pocket full of mumbles